The New Spymasters (7 page)

Although the British secret service's bungled intrigues added to Bolshevik paranoia and provided useful propaganda, it is hard to imagine that they really made much difference to the scale of this terrible revenge. Certainly, the active plotting against the Bolsheviks gave the Cheka an excuse to raid the embassy and sealed Cromie's fate. And if Reilly, Cromie and their friends had succeeded in their bolder plans and had, for instance, managed to kill some Soviet leader, then that could have led to further dire consequences. But with hostile troops on their territory, the Russians had plenty of reasons already to distrust the British. As Winston Churchill wrote later, this was a time of confrontation: ‘Were they [the Allies] at war with Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil.'
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But despite their clearly opposed interests, the Bolsheviks' foreign policy was intrinsically pragmatic. The discovery that Britain's diplomats were prepared to finance the assassination of Bolsheviks – proof of malicious intent – may have helped to sway their calculations, encouraging the view that negotiation was pointless and convincing them that Britain was hostile.

London neither sanctioned nor gave advance approval for Reilly's plots. SIS files provide no indication that Cumming knew that his agents were fomenting such schemes. Reilly and the others were sent to perform espionage, not organize coups. But this was not the age of micromanagement. His Majesty's agents, just like his ambassadors, were expected to think for themselves. When Reilly returned, Cumming gave no sign that he disapproved of his actions. Instead, Reilly was given the Military Cross and dispatched, within a month, to spy on the Soviets again (this time working with White Russian forces in the Ukraine).

Reilly was not dismissed from the secret service until 1921. Within twelve months, Cumming was advising his Vienna station that the ‘master spy' was now in the cold: ‘You should certainly not appear to be hiding anything from him or show a want of frankness, but at the same time be careful not to tell him anything of real importance.'
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For the next few years, Reilly continued his scheming, mostly for profit. Then, in 1925, he was lured back to Russia by Soviet agents, only to be captured and executed by the Cheka on 5 November. He had confessed to being an intelligence operative but – Russian archives revealed later – he did not name any of his comrades.
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*   *   *

So, what impact did all these escapades have on the nature of spying?

Actual spying in Russia, it was soon clear, would become nigh on impossible for foreigners like Reilly, even if they had been born there. The adventurer-spy Reilly had epitomized was rapidly becoming an anachronism – or at least under the sort of closed regime that the communists ran. Probably the last of such agents was Reilly's friend Paul Dukes, who entered Russia and continued to work undercover until 1920. He left unscathed and received a knighthood. Of all SIS's early spies, he was the most successful. A fluent Russian speaker who, as a music student, had a genuine reason for being in Petrograd, Dukes infiltrated local Bolshevik groups, worked in munitions factories and even joined the Red Army as a soldier (where he deliberately blew up the wrong bridges). But George Hill, in his report to British intelligence on his activities in Russia, spelled out in a very down-to-earth way the difficulties of performing secret work in the growing security state. For a start, there were simple practical problems. The telephone system was suspended or was monitored, so ‘it was quite impossible to give warnings or to ring up to find if the coast was clear'. Finding accommodation was equally impossible, because ‘house committees' were established that checked the identity of anyone renting a room, and the new ‘servants' league' offered rewards to servants who helped to ‘impeach their employers as enemies of the people'. Anyone's house was subject to search ‘without writ or order' and a cover story was hard to come by since so many professions were on a blacklist. Hill had bought an antiques-cum-chemist's shop as a cover, but now it was illegal to sell medicines without a licence and antiques were protected as ‘national treasure'. It was also hard to keep account of payments to agents. While they needed to be superbly ‘over-paid' to stop them earning more by betraying you, or turning to blackmail, none would sign a receipt.

As Hill explained, ‘It should be noticed that today in Russia not a single agent will put his name to any piece of paper or receipt, so that if in future agents are to be employed by us in Russia, any hope of establishing control by the old system of voucher must be abandoned.' Just getting hold of money – with the banks in revolutionary hands – was one of the ‘greatest difficulties of the Russian SS [secret service] work'.
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Summing up the nature of the profession in his memoirs, Hill described how British spies ‘commonly take up their dangerous duty out of sheer love of adventure'. But he hinted at the shift away from that and towards an activity defined by the hiring of others – towards, at its worst, renting a pair of second-hand eyes:

British spies have slipped through the Khyber Pass disguised as Afghans, or loitered in Eastern bazaars in the dress of native traders, but it is difficult for a man, however much he has tarried amongst them, to imitate with faultless exactitude the accent, habits, ways of thought of an alien people, and for that reason the espionage agent finds himself again and again compelled to resort to the employment of nationals. It is because of this part of his work, because of the necessity imposed on him of associating with traitors, that a certain odium has come to be attached to the name of spy.
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Whatever that odium, in the light of the experience of early Soviet Russia, modern spying came to depend on the employment of traitors. A government hired an intelligence officer working for an intelligence agency, and then that officer and agency hired a local person, usually an amateur, to actually do the spying and to betray their country's secrets.

The point is not that British or American officers never did any real spying themselves, but that stealing secrets was no longer their main job. Instead, others – be they stooges or fully informed recruits – were hired or cajoled to grab the secrets on behalf of the professionals.

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In the spy game after Reilly and Dukes, intelligence officers typically also handled these local recruits from a safer vantage point. For most of the interwar years, SIS officers retreated into the protection of British embassies. From 1919, the agreed primary cover of the SIS officer was as a ‘passport control officer' in the consular section. While this would not have protected Cromie, it was a compromise that usually gave Cumming's emissaries a degree of safety and also an excuse to be in the country (although not formal diplomatic immunity). It also kept spying at some distance from regular diplomacy. (Profits from issuing passports and visas to Britain also provided a secret additional subsidy for SIS that supplemented the ‘secret service vote', which was passed annually in Parliament in an open session.
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)

British soldier-adventurers continued to be sent in wartime to spy behind enemy lines. During the Second World War, swashbuckling types such as Fitzroy Maclean parachuted into German-held Yugoslavia to link up with the partisans, and fellow irregular Neil ‘Billy' McLean went into occupied Albania.

But after the Second World War, officers from almost all foreign services, including both SIS and the newly formed CIA, returned to embassy work. This time they worked undercover while fully accredited as diplomats, thus claiming immunity from prosecution for their activities under the Vienna Conventions. The drawback was this required them to exhaust themselves doing two jobs: both working for the spy service and performing their ‘cover tasks' – for example, by doing consular jobs.

The intelligence world had turned such a complete circle that to even call an intelligence officer a spy at the close of the twentieth century was seen as offensive and certainly inaccurate. In the official language of espionage, they were not even secret agents.

In 1978, the chief counsel of the US House of Representatives' Select Committee on Assassinations introduced the next witness, a Mr John Clement Hart, as ‘a career agent with the CIA, having served approximately twenty-four years'. He was to offer evidence on the interrogation of a KGB defector, Yuri Nosenko. After he swore the oath, Hart just had one point of clarification:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, gentlemen. Before I begin my statement, I would like to make a prefatory remark on a technical aspect of what was said about me … I was not and never have been what is called a career agent with the CIA. I bring that up only because that term happens to have a technical meaning in the Agency. I was what you would call an employee or an officer of the Agency. And I would like to have that made part of the record.
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In the jargon of the modern spy agency, those directly employed on the staff of the ‘service' were ‘operations officers', ‘case officers', ‘operatives', ‘handlers' and ‘spymasters' – many things, but not agents. At the CIA in particular, they liked this to be clear. In a 2004 talk, another former senior CIA operative, Howard Hart (no relation), made the point emphatically: ‘We are
not
spies, we run spies. We recruit spies.'
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The CIA elaborated on its website: ‘A spy is someone who provides classified information about his country to another country.'
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The same point of view could be heard in Britain. A former leading officer of British intelligence, interviewed in a quiet corner of England, was quite particular: ‘I take it rather badly to be called a spy. I would prefer you refer to me as a spymaster.' And this is what became of the secret service.

At the root of spying, such men knew, was a grubby act of betrayal. As Hill had hinted, the shift from spying directly to hiring others had made spying synonymous with treachery, and far less glorious. Spies could be liked but never fully trusted. Fundamentally, spies were not
our people.
They were and are – as ‘C' called Reilly – ‘very doubtful'.

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While in the real world the all-action ‘master spy' may have become a rare beast, he lives on in the popular imagination, as James Bond and other heroes of popular fiction demonstrate. For a fiction writer, it was certainly far more exciting to merge the now distinct roles of intelligence officer and secret agent. It was also expedient to blend the role of peacetime secret agent with wartime military intelligence work.

Ian Fleming, who wrote the Bond novels, got a taste of espionage when, in the Second World War, he worked as assistant to the director of naval intelligence. Here he had ample chance to meet the different elements of Britain's wartime secret state. In addition he got to know Colonel ‘Wild Bill' Donovan of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), who went on to found the CIA. In 1942, Fleming became involved in setting up a unit of commandos whose special mission was to make shock raids to gather intelligence. No wonder Fleming said the Bond character he invented was ‘a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war'.
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In the case of Bond, there is some indication that Fleming was also influenced by the Reilly legend, in particular through a friend, the same Bruce Lockhart, then head of the ‘black propaganda' political warfare executive, who had been Reilly's co-conspirator in Russia. One of Fleming's former colleagues at the
Sunday Times
claimed that Fleming ‘once told me he invented the character of James Bond after reading about the exploits of Sidney George Reilly in the archives of the British intelligence service'.
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This may be fanciful but, as Andrew Cook puts it:

Like Fleming's fictional creation, Reilly was multi-lingual with a fascination with the Far East, fond of fine living and a compulsive gambler. He also exercised a Bond-like fascination for women, his many love affairs standing comparison with the amorous adventures of 007. Unlike James Bond, though, Sidney Reilly was by no stretch of the imagination a conventionally handsome man. His appeal lay more in the elusive qualities of charm and charisma. He was, however, equally capable of being cold and menacing.
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Whether or not the influence was direct, Bond was in the Reilly mould. And while the real world of spying may have diverged, these stories firmly maintained a myth of spying that has suited agencies like SIS and the CIA. The fictional heroic deeds of their intelligence officers, their virtual invincibility and huge importance were a lure for recruits and intelligence sources. While the truth of intelligence was a classified secret, the myth was the attractive bright light.

One reason why myth is so important is that most good spies started as volunteers knocking on the door of agencies like the CIA and KGB. Their motives were driven by myth. And the false image has been relentlessly exploited. In a speech in 2004 after his retirement, James Pavitt – until then deputy director for operations at the CIA – conjured up an image of the modern spy business as a worthy successor to its forebears. ‘I would like to borrow the words of an Englishman from another time who – better than any spy novel – captured the spirit and ethos of the clandestine service,' he said. And then he spoke these lines:

From time to time, God causes men to be born who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news – today it may be far off things, tomorrow, of some hidden mountain, and the next day of some nearby men who have done a foolishness against the state. These souls are very few; and of these few, not more than ten are of the best.
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